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Does intelligence have to be conscious? Does it have to feel emotion? That’s the question a researcher called Zachary Mainen is asking, who has suggested that robots may benefit from antidepressants. Dr Mainen, who worked on AI before moving into study of the human brain, argues that the root cause of human depression is an inability to update their beliefs about the world in the presence of new information. He thinks that this ability, in human brains, is modulated by the chemical serotonin. If you don’t have enough serotonin in your brain, you can’t change your understanding of things easily enough.

The broad sweep of this is relatively familiar to people interested in how the brain works....